Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday June 19, 2012 @04:54PM
from the it's-the-mega-maid-sir dept.

derekmead writes "When urban planners were trying to turn New York's Roosevelt Island from a haven for the disabled and the mentally ill into a liveable city, they got utopian. Lying beneath their plans was an unusual technology: a series of tubes that literally suck garbage from buildings at speeds up to 60 miles per hour to a central collection point, where the trash is taken off the island by truck or barge. Theoretically, that eliminates the emissions and traffic caused by giant garbage trucks, and makes trash sorting easier. Now, more than thirty years after the 'AVAC,' or Automated Vacuum Collection System, was installed, Envac, the Swedish company that built it, is exploring how to upgrade it and even extend the system to other parts of the city. Under a new feasibility study conducted by City University and funded by two city agencies, the easiest option would be to stretch the current system south, to cover the new technology campuses being built on Roosevelt Island by Cornell University and the Technion. "

I lived on Roosevelt Island for many years. Individuals don't put anything into the system. The building maintenance staffs do that. Residents just drop their bagged garbage down a shut and it is put into the collection system from there.

That's more a commentary on the conditions of the island when it was used as a dumping ground for the disabled and mentally ill. They were not treated very well and didn't have the best accomidations. The difference between then and now, is that the disabled and mentally ill are just ignored, rather than being quarenteend on an unlivable island. Is it any better? Probably not, just different and less expensive.

I think most types of goods would not benefit from being sucked through a tube and crashing into other items at 60 miles per hour, so trash is special in that it can be transported in this way with no packaging around it. A generic transportation system sounds good too, but it will be far more expensive. Personally I don't know why we don't have a rail type system that transports people from any point to any other point. Like roads and cars but computer controlled so no need for drivers and no lower limit o

That's Brilliant! A Rail-Gun to transport people and garbage from point to point. No packing, no nets, just let 'er rip! Who says space is the final frontier?That beats the living crap out of my Human/Garbage cannonball idea, it involved packing customers and garbage in 55 gallon drums and wouldn't accommodate really fat people due to limitations of packing. With a rail gun you could fire a really fat person across the Atlantic. No one need be discriminated against. We could even fire our garbage across the

In every other city in the world this "human only system" that you speak of, aka the road, also transports the garbage.So there is like a 99.8% chance that you do ride in the same system as your own garbage....

It's not constantly sucking. There was an article on this system, I believe on Wired, a while back. Locally deposited trash goes into local holding area. It is emptied out as needed by periodic transfer (sucking) to a main collection point.

How does the so-called "carbon footprint" of this 24x7x365 sucker compare with once or twice a week garbage trucks?

I would imagine that large buildings in NYC would require daily pickup and each building would produce enough trash to fill an entire truck each day. A large office building in NYC has 50,000 or so people in it per day. Now if only the could upgrade the system to transfer recyclables to the recycling station.

> I would imagine that large buildings in NYC would require daily pickup

Obviously it's a bit of a special case, but I think the World Trade Center's garbage transfer facility actually kept some engineers busy for a few months planning it back in the late 60s or early 70s. Without getting into the obvious implications of Force = mass x acceleration, where acceleration = 9.8 meters/second per second and the potential energy from a thousand-foot drop, a single tower of the old WTC generated trash during the day faster than trucks could physically back into the loading dock, fill up, and haul it away. Apparently, they were mostly able to keep up until around 10:30am, then the first wave of trash hit from the morning coffee breaks, lunch pushed them into the realm of "hopeless", and they didn't finally catch up and get the system "emptied" again until sometime around 4am (the trash continued well past midnight, because the cleaning crews themselves generated wave after wave of trash).

From what I read, an entire category of trash management came into existence with the World Trade Center, from compaction all the way to heavy-duty trucks capable of dealing with a huge load of densely-packed trash. I believe that some new skyscrapers in China actually have on-site incinerators.

And how is "sorting easier" when it's flying into a "central collection point" (read: steadily growing pile) at 60 mph?

I lived on Roosevelt Island for many years. The trash is sorted in the building by residents (as in all NYC apartment buildings). Recyclables are run through the vacuum system at one time of day, and garbage during another time of day. It does help with the sorting at the collection station.

I work in NYC and it the walk to and from my office off the subway can smell very very awful on days where its hot and there was just a garbage pickup. All I could think was "Why isn't there a better method of collecting trash in the city other than leave it outside to rot till someone picks it up." There arent even trash cans to hold the bags, so all the "garbage juice" collects on the sidewalk and reaks. I couldn't really think of any good easy to implement and maintain methods (and this certainly doesn't

+5 Informative????!? Ok, here's some more tips for lonely slashdotters:
Do not put your dick in the light socket
Do not put your dick in the milking machine
Do not put your dick in the salami slicing machine
Do not put your dick in the toaster
Do not put your dick in anything that's been dead for more than 5 hours

There must have been countless horrific injuries before we had the internet to dispense this essential information.

Paris was famous for its system of pneumatic tubes used for mail delivery. The system was automated, with colour coded bands used for routing, some systems used electromagnet propulsion. If this garbage system works half so well,it will be great. I don't see anything about recycling or composting though. That's bad.
There is a great article on it here: http://www.cix.co.uk/~mhayhurst/jdhayhurst/pneumatic/book1.html [cix.co.uk]

I believe it can be done properly, but all I've seen from trash tubes are disgustingly dirty chutes that could not be properly cleaned and tended to attract cockroaches and the like. Either by accident (like a trash bag ripping inside the tube) or by improper use, they tend to become dirty and are impracticable to clean. Water pipes work because, well, there's water running on them. And trash cans, if they eventually become dirty, can be moved to be cleaned or at least replaced.

Methane would build up in the tubes, causing the potential for an explosion and whatever system "deals" with it can break down.

Certain animals would easily take refuge in the tubes and catch ridiculous amounts of diseases. With thousands of entrances and exits, that's a bad idea not to mention that it'd be a route directly into a building or house (potentially).

Then someone could break into the system anywhere and drop in poisonous gas that can get past methane and disease focusing blocking techniques and spread it to every building..

Are those things a major problem for the sewer system?There is more risk the water supply will be poisoned than the "garbage sewer". The garbage tubes also suck air, so unless someone rewires the system to reverse there is no threat of gas to come out of the residential tubes.

Some of us are interested in making sure that doesn't become a reality, and that means correcting misinformation. The claim was made that it could not work. It was pointed out that it has already worked. That it has worked is not a case of altering history. It's fact. That means it's important to repeat it and correct claims to the contrary.

When people throw their garbage down the trash chutes, it piles up for several hours, until a trapdoor opens, sucking the waste into a big underground pipe. Then a complex system of air valves propels the garbage through the pipe at speeds of up to sixty miles per hour. When the trash resurfaces at the Avac center, a squat building at the northern tip of the island, it is dumped into two silo-shaped cyclones, where it is spun like cotton candy and then whooshed down chutes into huge containers.

Okay: trash chutes, I get. Trapdoors, big underground pipe, series of air valves? No problemo, obviously we'll need all of those things. Dumped into two silo-shaped cyclones? Naturally. Wooshing it down (more) chutes into huge containers: of course.

But spinning the trash like cotton candy before the last step is where I draw the line! That's simply gratuitous. What were the protoype, pre-final chute/huge container designs: slushee constant mix machine? Season the garbage with bay leaves and slow cook it fo

Why not extend the system to carry all kinds of freight? It would be awesome to resupply stores, deliver packages, and the like the same way. It would dramatically cut the truck traffic in the city, with all the noise, pollution, and traffic they create. It's probably even safer, from a security standpoint, to have an expertly monitored system like that than a hundred thousand random vans, delivery trucks, and semis running around.